Anne and Matt March 2013 Net Worth

This month is Insurance Month in the series Naked With Cash. Each month, seven Consumerism Commentary readers anonymously share their financial reports to gain insight about their progress towards their goals. Read this introduction to learn more about the series.

Anne and Matt are twenty-seven years old, living in the Midwest, with two children. Read their bio here for background about their financial situation. Anne and Matt are on Team Neal, with Certified Financial Planner Neal Frankle.

Their goals are to strike a balance between saving for the future and enjoying the present and to save enough for retirement. Keep reading to see their net worth report, comments about the report and their progress, thoughts from Neal Frankle, and feedback from budgeting expert Jacob Wade, founder of iHeartBudgets.

This month, the Naked With Cash participants are discussing their taxes as a focus within their monthly financial status updates.

Anne’s comments and analysis

We used some of that extra cash to get a month ahead on our spending. So, we set aside $5,500 in an earmarked savings account, and we’ll use that money to pay all of our bills, investment contributions, fixed savings, and miscellany. Income exceeding $5,500 will go toward our other goals. The paychecks that we receive in April will be saved in that savings account, to be used the following month.

I had always struggled with the biweekly paycheck cycle, and also sometimes there was a delay with Matt’s employer actually paying him. It would be just a few days, but it would often mean I’d have to move money from savings to cover an automatic bill payment. Frustrating, but no more!

I mentioned I’d try You Need a Budget. I wanted to like it, because I know so many people do get a lot of benefit from it. But I just couldn’t get it to work for me. At first, I realized that it was because I wasn’t yet a month ahead on my spending (and I do think this principle is awesome).

Even though I could import transactions, I never felt confident that my YNAB balance was my true available balance to budget. I know you can reconcile accounts, but even so I felt confused with it. I didn’t like having to add every transaction myself. I’m glad I did the trial. Perhaps if I bought it and committed to it for a few months, it would eventually make more sense to me. However, I don’t want to spend the money on it, because truthfully I’m probably not going to use it in an effective way.

I also restarted my Mint account to track spending. I think I prefer that setup more, because it’s pulling data and categorizing it on my behalf. My hands-on part of it is much smaller, and I appreciate that. I know you can use it as a budgeting tool, but I haven’t set that up yet. Mostly, I want to see where our spending patterns have been lately.

I’m not particularly interested in reducing our spending by much, though. I don’t think we’re being reckless. I’m not interested in spending the least possible dollar at the grocery store, for example. We value quality produce, meats, and ingredients. Sometimes that costs more, and I don’t care. I’m just thankful we can swing it, whereas a few years ago we really did have to keep our food budget under a set amount so we could meet our other obligations.

At the risk of sounding like a huge jerk, our net worth has gone up every month we’ve been tracking it. We are fine. I don’t know what benefit we’d receive by pre-planning every dollar we’ll spend on discretionary purchases.

This month, the Naked With Cash participants are talking about taxes.

For 2012, our AGI was $96,000. The taxable income was $61,000, and our yearly federal tax obligation was $6,100. Our effective tax rate was 5.46%.

I anticipate a larger tax obligation this year, as Matt’s new job began mid-2012. We’ve adjusted the withholding so that we’re not going to get a big refund, but will still pay enough so that we won’t have to owe a lot, either. At some point, it will be worth meeting with a CPA to make sure we’re making the most out of our tax situation.

Our property taxes are affordable, at roughly $1,700 per year. We live in a state that levies a 7% sales tax. Our state has an income tax, but it’s among the lowest of states that tax.

Overall, I don’t feel burdened by our taxes. I do wonder what will happen in 2014 with the health care changes. I expect our health insurance to likely continue to be expensive, and I don’t know that we’ll qualify for much in the way of tax breaks.

Feedback from Neal Frankle, CFP

Congratulations on having a banner month. But I do want to point out a few items that might help going forward.

First, your net worth is important of course but I wouldn’t use it as a gauge of success or failure. Your net worth changes in the short-term because of market fluctuations and cash flow irregularities. Case in point, you commented that the extra money you received in March is going to pre-fund some spending.

So by that measure, it’s only going to show up on your balance sheet until the spending takes place. I would hate to see you berate yourself when your net worth declines over the short run because of:

a market decline, or

the spending flow catches up with you.

Net worth is something to look at long-term in order to really be helpful in my experience.

You mentioned also that YNAB didn’t work for you, and that’s fine. I’m really pleased you gave it a shot. However, you also mentioned that you are going to put a month’s salary aside for spending but then said you couldn’t use YNAB because you can’t put a month’s salary aside. So that confused me.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. If Mint works and you use it, that’s plenty good enough. You can also use bank statements as I’ve already mentioned. And many online banks like Everbank offer many free tools to help you master your budgeting too. These are all great free resources.

Just keep in mind that you can import data for YNAB and it does automatically assign categories. I just want to be fair to You Need A Budget.

I really liked that you very clear about not wanting to reduce your spending and that you are proud of your progress. I agree and that should be acknowledged.

I don’t have any comments for you on the tax side. It sounds like your situation is very straightforward, and you have a great handle on it.

My question is this however: What do you want help on, and what are you willing to do in order to achieve a different result? It sounds like you are quite content. There is nothing wrong with that — I am very content myself, financially. But as a CFP, I always try to understand what the problem is before I dive it to providing solutions.

Feedback from Jacob Wade

You guys are in a great position, especially for your age. I know that because you are kicking my butt, and I’m 27 as well :)

I am super glad to hear you are now a month ahead on your budget. My wife and I have been on this plan for over 4 years now, and it has been the single most important financial move we have made to reduce stress. I hope it results in the same for you!

Sounds like you’ve got a great CPA, glad to hear it. As a tax pro myself, I can definitely recommend hiring a good CPA to take care of your taxes, because the government isn’t getting any simpler, and I wouldn’t count on it anytime soon!

My question would be: Do you have any goals? I use my budget as a means to achieve my goals, so once I write them down, I reverse engineer how I’m going to get there, and then put those plans into action in my monthly budget. Whether is a sweet vacation or buying a new car, I put the money aside in a savings bucket each month to ensure I get there. That is the one place I could see being advantageous for you to plan for with a budget or budgeting software. Of course, I’d argue that there are 4,587,300 other reasons for a budget, but that’s the one that I think you’d enjoy most.

Read related articles from Consumerism Commentary

Although I believe budgets are an important tool (I still use one in retirement) they are not an end unto themselves. The most important thing is to know where the money leaving the house went to and you seem to have a handle on that. Decisions about how you spend your money can be aided by having a budget to compare it to, but budgets don’t solve problems they merely point to them. I only use six budget categories for spending but by just looking at them I’ll know about what I’m going to spend on: maintaining the household (Utilities & Services) and protect myself against (Insurances) to mention two.
I can’t agree more with Neal about the Balance Sheet. It’s a long term chart-maker that can ebb and flow based on things we can’t do a thing about. Just another tool that can lead to financial stability – right where you’re headed – in my opinion! Great report.

You don’t have to eat badly to save enormous amounts of groceries. You just have to be a savvy spender, aware of what good prices and bad prices are. My family eats almost everything prepared fresh, and we spend less than half of what the average American family spends–about $55-60 a week for a family of 4. Just this month, we’ve had zucchini, broccoli, mushrooms, carrots, strawberries, apples, oranges, asparagus, scallions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, bananas, and more. We’re mainly limited by picky kids. We’re hardly living on dried beans and rice!

I guess I should clarify about what I meant by the YNAB thing. I said *at first*, I wasn’t *yet* a month ahead on my checking account, so when I was initially setting up YNAB it wasn’t working out. Later in the month as more checks rolled in, it worked. But I still didn’t really like YNAB after that point, though I do appreciate what it was trying to accomplish.

As far as what problem I want to fix… Financially, I am content. The numbers work out, and I think we’re on a good path when it comes to money.

However, I am not happy with my family’s work-life balance. I feel like my husband has a too heavy workload, and not enough family time. I think he feels this way too, but he doesn’t know what can really be done about it. He doesn’t want to change jobs. I just wish there was a way to have more of his time back — so that he’s not seemingly *always* working.

It is something we’re going to have to figure out how to resolve, because long-term this is not sustainable.

The work/life balance is important, too. And so hard – because financially what you’re doing seems to work, so it’s hard to make changes to it for fear it will change that end of things. I don’t know the answer, either though :) I’m just commenting to agree that the work/life thing is so hard to figure out!
I also like your attitude about groceries. Even though my financial situation is no where near as stable as yours, I also make it a priority to buy the healthiest food I can for our family because I just feel like the cost of healthy foods now is far less than the cost of illness and disease later. So if I can take steps to prevent some of those – I should.

Thanks for sharing. I love reading about everyone’s progress and situation to try and learn from it all.

Jacob — Actually we haven’t hired a CPA, but it might be worth meeting one for some general guidance. I like doing our taxes via Turbo Tax, and when I have questions I’ve called their CPAs and have been very pleased with the response.

I realize I could be making a mistake, but I feel pretty confident with my tax filing in the past anyway.

As far as our savings goals and life goals…this is going to take some more thought. I mean yeah, saving for another car, a vacation, and those things are all on the radar. But having some actual plan? And something more tangible? I’ll need to get back to ya on that one.

Note: Use your name or a unique handle, not the name of a website or business. No deep links or business URLs are allowed.
Spam, including promotional linking to a company website, will be deleted. By submitting your comment you are agreeing to these terms and
conditions.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.

About Luke Landes

Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. Read more about Luke and about Consumerism Commentary.

Content on Consumerism Commentary is for entertainment purposes only. Rates and offers from advertisers shown on this website may change without notice; please visit referenced sites for current information. Per FTC guidelines, this website may be compensated by companies mentioned through advertising, affiliate programs or otherwise.

Advertiser Disclosure: Many of the savings offers
appearing on this site are from advertisers from which this website receives compensation for being listed here.
This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). These offers do not represent all deposit accounts available.